


Meraviglia

by cuddlebone



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Childhood Friends, Dreams and Reality are Muddled, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Sad with a Happy Ending, Somewhat sad, Unreliable Narrator, one of them is an unreliable narrator so please keep that in mind!!!!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-30
Updated: 2018-08-30
Packaged: 2019-07-04 16:31:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15845091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuddlebone/pseuds/cuddlebone
Summary: Wonwoo's gone. Soonyoung doesn't know what to do now that he's losing someone whose presence he always took for granted.(Somewhere between the rain and the darkness and the wind, they found a place to grow, like weeds sprouting through cracks in concrete.)





	Meraviglia

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aishiteita](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aishiteita/gifts).



> you said make them deeply in love and something more on the realism side!!!!! i think deep love can be expressed through a long friendship that stretches back into childhood, yearning, sometimes nostalgia, etc etc. and a love so deep that you're willing to uhh fight through the tough times??..... things like that. it's kind of basic but i really hope you like it nonetheless, and i hope it's at least somewhat fulfilling!! ily and thank u!!!!! <3

 

 

Soonyoung was a boy in an endless storm. His clothes were far too beautiful to be flecked with mud and rain, just as his face was far too beautiful to be flushed and flecked with tears. He had closed his eyes, and reality had slipped into dreams, and his umbrella had slipped out of his hands. The wind blew it inside out and sent it skittering across the street.

 

He opened them when he felt a hand tapping his shoulder, but he still doesn’t know if he’d opened them to reality or to a dream, one he hasn’t yet woken from. Wonwoo had folded the umbrella back into shape, and then he had taken one of Soonyoung’s hands, wrapping it around the handle. Then he’d smiled at him, and for the first time, Soonyoung saw a bit of blue sky peeking through the clouds.

 

 -

 

Seamless and smooth-sailing; that’s how everything has to be when Wonwoo spends the rare evening at home. The table’s set with flickering orange candles, lights off, a sunset glowing through the open windows. The shoes that usually litter the front doorstep are tidied. The bed is made with pillows and blankets for two.

 

He doesn’t do it to impress Wonwoo. No, they have too many years stretching between the time they met and the time they stand in now to give something like that much thought. He does it to make things easier on both of them, to make the pockets of time they’re granted together all the more golden. He does it, just as he does everything else, so he’s never the reason their boat is rocking.

 

“You’re untouchable,” Soonyoung slips up later on, his voice rough both from disuse and tart alcohol. “I feel like I don’t even know you anymore.”

 

Wonwoo laughs, to brush it off, brush it under the rug, tuck it away and pretend it isn’t true. “What do you mean?”

 

Soonyoung doesn’t tell him what he really means. The light in his eyes dies out, his momentary anger snuffed out by Wonwoo’s laughter and simplicity, a blown-out candle smoking in the dark. Soonyoung’s response is still the truth, but as diluted and twisted as can be. He can’t be the one to send them capsizing. It’s too early in the evening to drown. “Well, we’re not all as spruced-up and fancy as you are, for one thing.”

 

“That doesn’t matter, and you know it. You know I love you the way you are.” Wonwoo furrows his eyebrows. Soonyoung remembers them being thicker and more unruly, just as he remembers his skin blemished, and his eyes livelier, lips chapped, hair sloppier. There’s none of that nowadays; he always looks like a vision, always cut right out of the frames of a golden age film. “And I’m still your Wonwoo. Same old Wonwoo.”

 

 _No, you’re not._ “Haven’t you seen yourself on all those red carpets? Or even right now, for instance,” Soonyoung adds, gesturing towards him. A young god in a junkyard. An angel torn out of the corners of a gilded fresco. “Has no one in the city caught your eye?”

 

“Trying to get rid of me, Soonyoung?” Wonwoo plays with the cuffs of Soonyoung’s sweater sleeves, tugging him closer. “Not like you do.”

 

He says it so smoothly, and Soonyoung is caught in his light; he doesn’t know if this is why the casting directors love him, or if this smoothness is the result of playing so many roles, larger than life and so much grander than the small, simple Wonwoo beneath them. Maybe bearing so many personalities, so many characters, faces, and accents atop his own, is what’s erased and overpowered the Wonwoo Soonyoung remembers. Either way, it sounds like a line stolen from one of his studio scripts, and Soonyoung sulks, but he’s sure Wonwoo sees his ears darkening anyway, burning bright and hot under his love-bombs.

 

 -

 

Soonyoung remembers sitting in his beautiful clothes and waiting. His mother would keep telling him to stay still, to be patient, but Soonyoung’s eyes were on the clock in the corner, watching morning fade into noon and noon into earliest evening. The whole day ticked past while he sat and waited, and his mother made phone calls and pleaded to a voice that Soonyoung wished he didn’t recognize.

 

It was supposed to be a beautiful holiday. New clothes, presents wrapped in ribbon and string, a day off that families spent together. Only beautiful families did that, Soonyoung concluded.

 

He doesn’t blame his mother. He knew she was trying her hardest. He blames the voice he always hears filtering through the phone, for never having been around; not recently enough for Soonyoung to have a face or a name to attach it to, at least.

 

So he had gone for a walk in the rain, through empty streets, just so his mother wouldn’t have to see his real face, the one he usually hid beneath something more stoic.

 

Wonwoo was a stranger, and the only truly beautiful thing about that day. Soonyoung and Wonwoo’s meeting at that very moment was nothing short of catching lightning in a bottle.

 

-

 

After a few days spent unwinding and unraveling in Soonyoung’s presence, bits and pieces of the old Wonwoo begin to emerge. They’re still muddled with odd phrases and words he never used before, a sharper temper, a coldness better directed at prying interviewers than at the person closest to him.

 

Soonyoung tries to picture-preserve these moments in his mind. He reminds himself that no one else sees him like this, and that Wonwoo puts on his very best mask for Soonyoung’s eyes only. After dark, lights out, behind closed doors. Breathing deeply, entirely himself. Lips stained and food dribbling down his chin. Tripping over the doorjamb and catching himself on Soonyoung’s arms. Forgetting to roll his sleeves up before washing his hands, just as he did when they were children. Kissing the cat’s forehead, and complaining when he comes away with fur stuck to his lips. Kissing him like he has all the time in the world, like the sun will never rise and he won’t have to leave Soonyoung alone in a cold, empty bed.

 

Now he holds him against the doorway, silhouetted by the dim hall light, imprinting shallow love down his body, hastily rolling his sweater away so he can press the kisses down his stomach.

 

Imprints are all they can leave on each other now. Wonwoo’s lips leave marbled purples that bleed into his skin, until time washes them away and leaves it an unmarred canvas for Wonwoo to repaint again and again. Wonwoo’s lips leave imprints of words, spoken aloud only once but repeated like a broken record through Soonyoung’s mind.

 

Soonyoung’s imprints are more obvious, but more quiet all the same; he sees pictures of Wonwoo walking down streets and getting into cars in his sweaters, borrowed for so long that Soonyoung considers them stolen. Stolen as Wonwoo was from his arms, perhaps. He hears the words he uses often on Wonwoo’s tongue, he sees himself imprinted in Wonwoo’s laughter and in his smile. The whole world would never have seen him smile this widely and freely had it not been for Soonyoung coaxing them out of him for years, chipping at his tight lips until they broke apart.

 

Soonyoung sighs, and thinks about how Wonwoo will fall asleep with his head in his lap later, Soonyoung stroking his hair like no one else can. And sometimes, that’s enough.

 

But beneath the kisses, something is very wrong. Soonyoung can taste it on Wonwoo’s skin and sense it on his tongue. And he wonders how much longer they’ll last.

 

-

 

“Soonyoung? Can you hear me?” Wonwoo’s voice is garbled and chopped thin, like he’s calling from a phone-booth at the bottom of the ocean.

 

“What’s up? Lots of weekend traffic backing you up?” Soonyoung asks, cheek pressed against the window-screen, looking down at his little street, winding away down a hillside of black trees and drifting fog. He’s waiting to see the tinted windows and blurred license plate of Wonwoo’s car pulling up his little cul-de-sac. Then he’ll abandon the window, and throw the front door open, thin socks on gravel as he runs to hug him, and with every visit and every time his arms find their place around his waist, his reluctance to let him go grows.

 

“I can’t.” Soonyoung’s heart stills. “I forgot about this thing I was supposed to be doing today-”

 

“Another schedule with your friends?” Soonyoung interrupts, deflating. He feels how temporary his happiness was, and how those two words were a needle to its balloon.

 

“Co-stars, not friends,” Wonwoo huffs. Both their irritation is misdirected, because there’s not enough time, and the tightrope they’re balanced along will tremble too hard even if there was. The circumstances spin, turning them against each other, instead of helping them understand that they’re just two sides of the same coin. “Next week?”

 

He’s never heard Wonwoo sound clipped and insincere. For a moment that lasts too long, Soonyoung finds no familiarity and comfort in his voice, finds himself listening to a stranger on the other end of the line. It’s disembodied, faceless and nameless, and the unspooling that begins within him runs hot, like tears down cheeks. Tears that disappeared among the raindrops the first time.

 

 -

 

It’s television Wonwoo, smiling his television smile, plastic and glass and empty eyes. Soonyoung knows, because he can see right through them, right through to the other side that lies dormant and hidden beyond and beneath.

 

He has his hand over the armrest, fingers wrapped around the remote, and he raises the volume every time Wonwoo answers a question.

 

“All your co-stars are dating one another, but you’ve kept your romances private for as long as the camera’s known you.”

 

“Oh, you don’t need to worry about me. There’s someone out there waiting for me,” Wonwoo replies easily, two birds with one stone. He avoids disclosing whether that person is presently waiting for him- he is, missing him so dearly that he’s tuning into reruns instead of sleeping- or whether it’s a lover he’s yet to meet. The interviewer goes on about how Wonwoo’s handsome enough to bring flocks of people out to preen and fight for his attention.

 

But what if he didn’t have Soonyoung waiting for him? What if Soonyoung became tired of trailing along his coattails, tired of sweeping up his dust and gathering dust of his own waiting for him? What if he didn’t want to be Wonwoo’s hushed secret anymore? What if he stopped loving him, stopped forgiving him one day, stopped hanging onto his every promise and his every word? Stopped letting him into his home late at night, into warm shadows away from the limelight, and didn’t let him collapse into his arms once the curtains were drawn? He’s stuck in a wind-up warp at Wonwoo’s hands, and now that he’s begun to unspool, it seems to have begun winding back, dipping into memories so old they’ve gone blue.

 

Everything flows backwards. All but Soonyoung’s red-hot sadness, which begins to melt and spill forwards out of him. He’s been wondering when Wonwoo would stop taking him and his permanence, his warm constance, for granted, but now he thinks he’s been foolish, idyllic even, to expect such a thing.

 

He resents him. He resents letting him go, letting them snap him up, swallow him whole, steal him away from his arms. He resents his smile, and his voice, and his excuses, and through resenting them, he resents himself.

 

The remote falls out of his hand and clatters across the tile, its batteries flying beneath the couch. The cat jumps and hisses, but Soonyoung doesn’t jolt. He just closes his eyes, and dreams.

 

 -

 

Through rain and shine, Wonwoo had been Soonyoung’s escape.

 

“Today, the floor at my house might as well be covered in eggs,” Soonyoung says, eyebrows furrowed, looking troubled.

 

Wonwoo doesn’t laugh when he corrects him. “It’s like walking on eggshells, you mean?”

 

When Soonyoung does nothing but nod and stare at the road up ahead of them, the bend they’re about to round, lined with bare trees and their fallen leaves, Wonwoo hesitates, almost for long enough to be awkward, before throwing his arm over Soonyoung’s shoulder and pulling him close. “That’s why we go on walks like these, Soonyoung.”

 

It’s true. Soonyoung can either talk, spill until he’s dry and empty and there’s nothing left within him, or he can walk quietly by Wonwoo’s side, until, of their own accord, the feelings begin to evaporate in the wind, the more winded his breathing, the more quickly they’re discarded. No matter what he chooses to do, Wonwoo will be there, honest and open and ready to face and solve any problem, to offer advice and to comfort.

 

Soonyoung never thanks him when they make their way back to his front step and Wonwoo’s waving goodbye, because he knows there will always be a next time, a tomorrow. That, and he doesn’t know what to say, or how to say it, let alone how to make it mean as much as he feels.

 

These days build into years. Soonyoung doesn’t notice the difference immediately, but on one of these evenings, as sweet, fragrant rain drips down, Wonwoo disappears between the oaks, but Soonyoung’s fear of separation and change doesn’t have time to flare up before Wonwoo emerges again. And Soonyoung wouldn’t have seen it if he hadn’t found a picture of the two of them from a years-ago birthday party when he was tidying his room earlier. Wonwoo has changed entirely before Soonyoung’s eyes, but it went unnoticed, just as early sprouts go unnoticed until they’re in full spring bloom.

 

Wonwoo had been frail and delicate, wide-eyed, soft-cheeked, at the time. This Wonwoo has something very newly grown-up about him. He’s like a young deer with fresh, full antlers, just shedding his velvet. His voice is richer, his words are wiser, but still he stumbles and stutters and hiccups, still he sits in his favourite playground swing despite very visibly outgrowing it.

 

“I think growing up can be slowed down or sped up depending on how you want it,” Soonyoung tells him one day.

 

“You think so? But I’m an early bloomer, and I’m not ready to say goodbye to my childhood,” Wonwoo answers thoughtfully, sitting at one of the table’s benches and biting into the corner of a cream popsicle.

 

“I’m just trying to excuse the fact that I haven’t grown at all in the past year. You, on the other hand...” Soonyoung looks down at his arms and his legs, stretched across the top of the shady picnic table, and knows immediately that it’s a lie he’s weaving to Wonwoo. His hands alone have shed every bit of that baby-softness, knuckles jagged and fingers thinner and longer.

Not to mention the growing pains, aching all over, keeping him up at night. He’s even started to have growing pains deep in his chest, that he feels only when he looks at Wonwoo. Sometimes, he even feels them when he thinks about him in the dark loneliness of his room at bedtime.

 

(His heart grows with him, outpacing his thoughts, which are still stuck in an in-between, wandering between children’s love and something warmer.)

 

-

 

Soonyoung lets the wind blow him down the street. He almost doesn’t remember that storms can come in strong and unrelenting, because his skies had been so clear for a while. At the street-corner is a theater, and he remembers standing here with Wonwoo, judging the films by their posters. He looks through them, absently, and his eyes land on a black-and-white one, the characters standing against a lit-up city’s skyline. Wonwoo’s in the lead, done-up to look messy, because Soonyoung’s seen him at his worst, and his worst is much more unattractive, and so much more endearing than this.

 

The wind, and the realization that this isn’t the Wonwoo he knows, breathe a coldness down his neck. He feels cut-off, a third-person, a fly on the wall, anything but the feeling one should get when seeing their childhood friend and first and only lover. He feels like a stranger, just as anyone else on this street would feel when looking at pictures of Wonwoo.

 

For a terrifying moment, Soonyoung can’t recognize the Wonwoo he knows within the Wonwoo on the posters and on his television after midnight. For a terrifying moment, Soonyoung’s memories go blank.

 

His whole life may as well be one of Wonwoo’s films now. Their little town is a set, and has been all along, and his house is cardboard and collapsible, and Wonwoo walks through and uses what he needs, leaving when it pleases him, because there are no hard feelings, because at the end of the day, it’s all about playing a role. Nothing is concrete, and nothing is true.

 

(In a way, they’re both actors, and they both sift between masks and characters, realities and dreams, so Soonyoung has no right to blame Wonwoo. Not when he’s just as flighty, capricious, and delicate.)

 

People begin to shuffle past him, making a wide circle around him as they walk down the sidewalk. He stands there, letting them jostle and bump into him and mumble unapologetic apologies, feeling drowned in a sea of unfamiliar faces, including the one staring back at him from the poster hanging on the theater wall.

 

Soonyoung doesn’t even notice himself taking his phone out of his pocket until it’s pressed to his ear and ringing, and there’s a scuffle and a scratch followed by Wonwoo’s voice picking up. He stares at his face on the poster as he speaks, and even though he hasn’t spoken to Wonwoo in days, he forgets about greetings and niceties. “What do I do if I’m terrified of being surrounded by people, but even more scared of being alone?” He asks. He speaks of the long term, of the future, not of the simple act of being alone at this moment, or of being alone until Wonwoo visits him next weekend.

 

Soonyoung can almost see Wonwoo opening his mouth and closing it again, hovering between thought and answer. He’s quiet for so long that Soonyoung perks up when he hears his voice again. “You stay by my side then, right? Just as you always have. I can help you navigate through it all.”

 

“But you’re not by my side right now,” Soonyoung says flatly. Wonwoo’s throat dries.

 

Soonyoung is the supporting role. Wonwoo will tell him the people’s words don’t hurt him as he, in the same breath, rubs his tired, bloodshot eyes and pulls at his hair and complains about rumors and gossip. Soonyoung is the shoulder to soak behind closed doors, but never the hand to hold and the cheek to kiss in public, never the lover to proclaim to the crowds.

 

One of these days, Wonwoo will come to him a mannequin, pale and beautiful and synthetic, a mask no longer necessary, because the boy beneath has melded into it and disappeared. “You can’t come back to me and expect me to be yours anymore, Wonwoo. I’m done being your little secret.”

 

“Just wait a little longer, Soonyoung.” Wonwoo sounds both insincere and broken, and Soonyoung doesn’t know when his words are rehearsed and when they’re genuine anymore, if he’s acting or if he’s simply  _being_. He doesn’t know the eithers from the ors, the whiches from the whethers, the whens from the ifs.

 

“Why should I?”

 

“Look, Soonyoung, if I see you-”  _If_ , and not  _when_. A slip of the tongue, but he catches himself too late, “when I see you, we can talk about this. Wait until then? Stay with me.”

 

Soonyoung stays with him. Wonwoo hangs up eventually, and the line is a dead monotone in his ear, but he doesn’t notice, because he’s walking the plank anchored in reality and stretching into dreams, and now, it trembles beneath him. He closes his eyes, and dreams. He dives, off the deep end.

 

 -

 

“I used to be afraid of the moon when I was younger, you know.”

 

“Why’s that?” Wonwoo pauses to stare up at their only source of light, milky, hazy, and so full it looks to be spilling over, filling this midsummer hillside with midnight’s light. Everything is as visible as it is in sunlight, but it’s inverted, the shadows and the darkness rolling before their eyes.

 

“I used to think it was following me,” Soonyoung says, and Wonwoo can’t help but notice how he still avoids looking at the moon. He steals a glance at it, but he looks away and shivers, pulling his hood over his head. One of these nights, perhaps under a blue moon, this little detail will be too much for Wonwoo, and he’ll be so overcome that he’ll embrace Soonyoung from behind and rock him in his arms, protecting him from a moon that means no harm in its curiosity. He and the moon seem very alike, he thinks, in the way they’d both follow Soonyoung to the end of the world.

 

Wonwoo lets out a laugh that seems more like a howl here in the dead of night. “What does that make me, then? I’m following you right now.” He walks in a circle around Soonyoung, eyes trained to his silver-washed, moon-lit face. “Some would even say I’m orbiting you.”

 

Then he trails behind him, holding onto the warm tips of his fingers as he leads them deeper into the trees, knowing not where they’re going, relying entirely on Soonyoung. “I’m not afraid of it anymore, Wonwoo,” Soonyoung bluffs, turning to him. “I may have even grown to love it.” His words hold another meaning that, for all his wit and wisdom, Wonwoo doesn’t catch.

 

The moon hangs over them, an eavesdropper using the handy excuse of being there to light their path, following them as they walk, watching them as they talk, and wishing for all its craters that they’d kiss in its presence.

 

-

 

“The morning paper says you’re dating a young starlet again,” is how Soonyoung chooses to greet Wonwoo when he climbs into his car tonight, deadpan and quiet, an icebreaker that was cold before it left his mouth. The sky is black, and the windshield is splattered with fat raindrops.

 

Wonwoo presses into the leather headrest. “Rumors and gossip, Soonyoung.”

 

“I know, I know. I’m just keeping you updated on how the world, including your tiny little hometown, sees you.” Wonwoo begins to drive, and the world around them narrows down to what little snippets they see of swaying trees and, through them, distant city glow, and whatever else is caught in the bright yellow headlights. The moon is hidden, and for that Soonyoung is glad, but the streetlights are few and far between, and they cast eerie white fluorescence across the car every time they pass beneath them.

 

The rain falls harder when Soonyoung speaks. His words feel like gum that has lost its flavour, and in this moment, in this quiet tension, he finds it in him to spit them out. “You keep saying it’ll get better, and that I should wait, but when will it?”

 

“You can’t predict the future. Would you have predicted any of this five years ago?” Wonwoo asks, fingers tight around the steering wheel.

 

The moon rises, and hangs in the corner of Soonyoung’s eye, chasing their car as it rounds the bends of this mountain road. Its presence is beginning to worry him again. “No, but that’s exactly my point. You’re saying it’ll get better, but even you can’t predict that. You can’t be sure it will.”

 

“And you can’t be so sure it won’t,” Wonwoo responds, taking Soonyoung’s hand in his. He holds it for a while, and then he leans over and kisses Soonyoung’s forehead. The moon rises and gazes down upon them. It hangs, grimacing, glowing forlornly as its sky sobs onto their car.

 

“Tell me what’s wrong.”

 

“Nothing’s wrong,” Soonyoung says.  _Everything is wrong_. He usually says one thing when he really means another, and Wonwoo has been perceptive for as long as Soonyoung’s known him. He picks up on what Soonyoung needs, and gives it to him wordlessly.

 

“This is the first time I hug you and you don’t hug me back. Your arms hung slack and you didn’t lean into me. And it’s the first time I kiss you and you look like you’re going to cry,” he says immediately. Soonyoung would rather push Wonwoo away than resent him any more than he does, but he’s too afraid of the change to accept it. “You always say one thing, and then later on, I find out you wanted something else entirely, and you were expecting me to pick up on it. So I want you to tell me what you really mean, and what you really want.”

 

“I’m tired of this.” Soonyoung’s answer is simple, because sometimes, the truth can be watered down and diluted. He looks out the window as he speaks, because it’s too hard to talk while looking into reflective eyes, his favourite eyes, a deep ocean he usually dives into. “I don’t want us to live apart like this anymore.” He doesn’t want to feel separation anxiety clawing its way up his throat every time Wonwoo leaves, nor does he want to have it lingering, barely stifled, in the time stretching between Wonwoo’s phone-calls and visits.

 

He doesn’t want to spend every waking moment worrying about Wonwoo because he’s too far away. If this goes on, he’ll spend the rest of his days dreaming and yearning about wanting to wrap his arms around him and have him tucked away, his safety guaranteed, shielded from everyone and everything, only to wake up alone in a cold sweat, gripping his sheets for a Wonwoo far gone and hours away. Now, however, Soonyoung is beginning to realize, in this car and on this night, that Wonwoo feels far even when he’s seconds away.

 

 _Does he even cry anymore?_ Soonyoung wonders, and resents himself for it immediately.

 

“I know. So am I.”

 

“Then stay with me tomorrow and forget about the city and the screenings and the interviews and the gossip.” The more agitated Soonyoung gets, the wilder his lines run, his script spiraling into chaos. The wilder the storm spins, too, the forest around them spiraling into fog and sleet.

 

Wonwoo’s sigh fills the car and gusts wind through the trees. “You know I can’t. Put yourself in my shoes for a minute, Soonyoung.”

 

When he finally turns to look at Wonwoo, he sees his face cratered and chipping, waxing and waning under both the emotions and the flickering streetlights flowing across it. It feels like catching a courtyard statue blinking.

 

 -

 

They’re waltzing between the ferris wheel and the merry-go-round, to a dated music-box lullaby that both of them are familiar with but cannot put a name to. Wonwoo has caramel popcorn stuck in his hair, and tickets are falling out of his back-pocket as they gain speed, but Soonyoung’s hands are too comfortable on Wonwoo’s hips to be bothered with either thing, and they’re spinning, spinning so fast that the town fair’s lights blur into a warm yellow haze. Wonwoo doesn’t need to use words to tell him that everything will be alright, and Soonyoung doesn’t need to do anything other than hold Wonwoo close to his chest.

 

Just when it becomes cloying, overwhelming, dizzying, and Soonyoung wants to stop, they do, swaying as they settle against this new backdrop.

 

They’ve escaped childhood, cleared the early and uncomfortable stages of adulthood entirely, and found a little place for themselves somewhere in the middle. Soonyoung is safe here, and the change is sudden but not unwelcome. He doesn’t have to worry about tuition or a broken family or a faceless father any further. He’s made a beautiful life of his own, with a beautiful boy he’s grown up with, will grow old with, and will take his last breaths with.

 

Their little place is a trickle of condensed light, of caramel sweetness and warm yellow glow, shielding them from an overcast world. A fireplace in the snow, a lamp in the dark, a flashing lighthouse in dangerous waters.

 

Soonyoung has finally had a taste, just a trickle, just a sip, of a life worth fighting for.

 

Then Wonwoo’s packing a suitcase of clothes, and they’re sitting at the foot of their bed, Soonyoung’s hands in Wonwoo’s lap, Wonwoo thumbing his knuckles and nuzzling him gently. Then they’re at the door, and Soonyoung chokes on his goodbye (it never makes its way out), and begins to cry. He clings onto the edge of Wonwoo’s sleeve, pulling him back in and hugging him, but no matter how much he prolongs this, Wonwoo is still going to leave. Within minutes, he’s gone, and Soonyoung stands in his dust and his wake.

 

Soonyoung flinches when he hears a click, and he resents himself for even considering the idea of it being Wonwoo’s keys in the door. It’s just the house settling. He pulls the covers over his face, hiding from the corners of his room. Why fear the moon, if it’s a light in the dark? Why fear the dark, if it means the moon is gone?

 

 -

 

Wonwoo always holds the door open behind him, and it’s a habit people have caught onto and questioned. It’s an old habit that won’t die, because he’s used to having Soonyoung by his side, so used to it that his subconscious still buys everything in pairs, still makes enough morning coffee for two, and brightens up and turns to tell Soonyoung of his ideas throughout the day, only to realize that there’s no one at his shoulder waiting to hear them. He doesn’t think he will ever adjust to the absence, and he tries to save every little thing up for when he finally sees him, to shower him with everything he’s wanted to say and do, but it’s hard to hold onto things so impermanent and capricious.

 

If Wonwoo’s an archway, then Soonyoung’s his cornerstone, and he’s crumbling now.

 

Their house had been unfurnished, every dish chipped, cold on winter nights, and both of them working couldn’t dam and bridge the gap. When the opportunity presented itself on one fine afternoon, Wonwoo had been tentative about chasing a dream so grand, but Soonyoung was the one who had encouraged him. Soonyoung had helped make all the ends meet, hugged him and pushed him forward, gave him thumbs-ups and blew him kisses from behind the cameras.

 

Things only turned bittersweet when they had to separate, because their house was too far away from where Wonwoo had to be for most of the week. He wanted to bring Soonyoung with him, but Soonyoung was partial to their little town, and if Wonwoo could’ve stayed, he would’ve. He offered to cut it all off, but Soonyoung had told him to do what he thought was best, and now Wonwoo wishes he could go back to that fork in the road.

 

Some days, Soonyoung’s boundaries are high when Wonwoo visits, wilted and rotten and barbed with thorns, and on others they’re torn down, and roses and ivy bloom through the ruins.

 

Visiting Soonyoung is still a breath of vividness in his polluted lungs, and in a way, he’s grateful he and Soonyoung are still putting up a fight. Because the day they give up on trying to work through this, when all their will and investment and desire has been spent, is the day it’ll all come crashing down. The boat capsizes, the tightrope snaps.

 

Wonwoo stumbles into the crowd, and wishes the hand that caught him had been warmer, familiar, a better fit in his.

 

-

 

Soonyoung sleeps, and an entire lifetime bursts forth in the hours between dusk, midnight, and dawn. He sees himself in another world, a stretched reality, where Wonwoo walks a few steps ahead of him, in plain sight yet somehow out of reach. Their story unfolds from its beginning to its end, paralleling his own but never ending quite right. It never ends how he envisions it to, how he wants it to. It’s always two children he sees, then two boys, then two men, then one gravestone.

 

The line between reverie, dream, and nightmare begins to blur. Soonyoung loses track, count, and grip. Soonyoung blinks, and he’s standing with his toes in the sand and his fingers in Wonwoo’s, the memory lasting sweetly, kissing his eyelids shut. It seems to go on for hours, but when he opens his eyes, he hasn’t moved from where he stands in the middle of a crowded shop.

 

He shoves his hands into the fleece-lined pockets of his old jacket, scratchy from being overused and over-washed for too many years. He digs deep, and pulls an old, faded blue wrapper out. It’s a sugar packet, heavily dated, a souvenir from the motel he and Wonwoo stayed in on an eleventh grade field-trip. He remembers stealing it from the breakfast table, subsequently burning his tongue on watery, too-sweet coffee, and laughing into Wonwoo’s shoulder.

 

 

The rain drenches them uncomfortably, pelting and dribbling down the napes of their necks. The steady stream of the shower they stand under now, in an orange-tiled stall after peeling their sopping clothes away, shouldn’t be so different from the rain outside, but it is, welcome and silky and gentle.

 

It takes Soonyoung a while to realize. He struggles with wet fingers and a tiny sachet of motel-provided shampoo in the meantime, and Wonwoo helps rub it into his hair, and when Soonyoung opens his eyes again, the mirror and window are too steamy to see through anymore.

 

Wonwoo feels a lot taller than him these days, especially when they’re pressed up against each other like this. He looks good with his hair wet, droplets running down the bridge of his nose, his skin glistening. “What are you thinking of?” He asks, when he notices Soonyoung gazing up at him quietly.

 

“You want me to answer that honestly?” Wonwoo nods. Soonyoung clears his throat and turns away, pretending to busy himself with finding the bar of soap. “I’m thinking you’re kinda gorgeous.”

 

_“Kinda?”_

 

“Yeah, sorta.” Soonyoung shrugs very pointedly, trying his hardest to seem nonchalant, just in case things don’t happen as he’s hoping they will.

 

“Would it be weird if I told you that hearing you say that made me want to kiss you?”

 

“Not any weirder than me telling you you’re kinda sorta gorgeous as we’re showering together,” Soonyoung replies almost immediately, his mouth working too quickly for the rest of him to catch up on what’s being said and what’s about to be done. When he does, he forgets to exhale.

 

“Well, in that case: hearing you say that made me want to kiss you,” Wonwoo repeats. He pulls him in slowly, but the bar of soap still slips out of his hands and clatters against the wall. It’s a very simple kiss. Their lips barely touch before it’s over, sweet and tentative and nervous, because they’ve only ever seen this in the films, and they’re both too busy pretending to know what they’re doing.

 

His lips are like milk and honey before bed. “You taste like shampoo, but I’m not saying it’s bad,” is what Soonyoung tells him instead, making Wonwoo snort and laugh.

 

Wonwoo picks up the soap and puts it back in Soonyoung’s hands, and Soonyoung blurts something out as he does. “I like you.”

 

“Oh, I know,” Wonwoo says it so simply, and he’s not even meaning to tease. Soonyoung’s ears redden. “But would it be weird if I told you I love you?”

 

 

There are two beds in their room, separated by a rickety nightstand, facing a wall-mounted television and sliding glass doors that open onto a currently flooded balcony. Of those two options, they choose to watch the forest and the rain.

 

Their clothes are wrung-out and stretched over the armchair and the radiator, and together they sit in pajamas, each on their own bed, a few feet apart, caught between loud and quiet, shy and bold.

 

The lights dim, flicker, and go out, and watching the forest and the rain instead of the television is no longer a choice. The world outside is on the verge of darkness, but once his eyes adjust, Wonwoo’s hunched figure is clear-cut in Soonyoung’s eyes, as is Soonyoung’s sprawled, haphazard silhouette in Wonwoo’s.

 

“I can already feel it starting to get cold without the heater,” Soonyoung complains, shy and quiet.

 

Wonwoo wants to propose something loud and bold, and he was about to, but the lights flicker and blind them before he can, and the television turns on, all rainbows and static.

 

Soonyoung switches the channel, jumping from one black-and-white film to the other, and Wonwoo watches him more than he watches the television or the forest and the rain. Eventually, he shuts it off and tosses the remote so it bounces across the bed. He rolls onto his stomach and pins his chin into the goose-down duvet, looking up at Wonwoo. “My bed’s too big, I think.”

 

He makes it so easy for Wonwoo to be bold. “I don’t know why they gave us a room with two beds, to be honest. It’s a waste of space, isn’t it?” The part of Wonwoo’s bed that isn’t taken up has never looked so inviting.

 

Soonyoung nods and in the blink of an eye, in a flash of white lightning, he’s next to Wonwoo. The room is warm, the lights are all on, but it just feels better when they’re closer together.

 

It’s new and different when it’s time to sleep. It feels safer to sleep in someone’s arms, it feels like nightmares and waking worries can’t reach you when your hand is clasped in someone else’s. Wonwoo’s warmer than blankets, just as his lips are, sweeter even than milk and honey.

 

This is how they decide they want to be together. When they wake up, Wonwoo kisses Soonyoung’s forehead, and Soonyoung rubs the sleep-dust out of Wonwoo’s eyes, and then Wonwoo makes them sandwiches with too much peanut butter and not enough jelly, and that’s that. No confessions, no statements needed. They can kiss and hold each other close every night and still be best of friends, and nothing has to change.

 

 -

 

Soonyoung and his feelings are like storms in teacups. “I think I’m most afraid of losing everything I know,” he remembers saying, when he was a fair bit younger than he is now, when he and Wonwoo would go out and get lost walking together. “I’m afraid of everyone and everything being taken away from me.”

 

Wonwoo has always been his anchor, the calm before his storms. “I’m your pillar, though, right?” Wonwoo had replied, his words always so much smoother and more sincere than Soonyoung could ever make his sound. “You can always count on me to be with you.”

 

“But what about you?” Soonyoung had then asked, tilting his head to one side and playing with Wonwoo’s hand, running his fingers along the veins. “It’s always you taking care of me. When will I be your pillar?”

 

“One day, you will be. When I need you, like you’re needing me now.”

 

 -

 

When he tries to close his eyes and dream of a future alternative to the one he has, he sees many things. First he sees himself and Wonwoo on a red carpet, the white flashes of the cameras dizzying, and then he sees them in the corner of a limousine, Wonwoo’s tuxedo halfway undone.

 

Then he sees himself on a porch someplace, and Wonwoo’s weeding the backyard, wiping sweat from his forehead and smiling at him, and this time Wonwoo is someone only Soonyoung lights up for, and the world can’t have even a morsel of him. This Wonwoo is by his side when he wakes and when he sleeps.

 

Soonyoung sits in the diluted sunlight of dreams, touching him but not warmly enough, the smell of the breeze making him think of both days past and days yet to come.

 

He realizes that he can’t see a future, a reality, or a dream without Wonwoo in it. He realizes that Wonwoo has needed him all this time, and he’s done nothing but push him away. He’s feared resenting Wonwoo and the changes happening so much that he’s ended up stretching the distance between them. Soonyoung opens his eyes.

 

 -

 

It takes many knocks for Wonwoo to come to the door, but when he opens it and sees Soonyoung looking smaller and quieter than he ever remembers him being, he falls apart almost immediately. Soonyoung sees it in his eyes before it makes its way down his cheeks. He pulls Soonyoung in, and just barely pushes the door closed before he wraps his arms around him too tightly, rocking them back and forth.

 

This silence shouldn’t be broken, Soonyoung thinks, so he keeps all the words he’s saved up over the entirety of the train ride here inside. He lets himself revel in the feeling of Wonwoo’s body in his hands, in the smell of Wonwoo’s hair, the softness of his neck, the gentle rise-and-fall of his chest pressed against his. He lets it bleed into him. He lets it calm him down.

 

And Wonwoo’s lips find his, and they’re kissing, and they’re spinning through the house, stumbling towards a huge, empty bed. And Soonyoung leans against the stiff headboard, Wonwoo’s head on his shoulder, fingers running through his hair, playing with the silky strands. For once, Soonyoung’s eyes are dry, and Wonwoo’s are swollen and sparkling at the corners. And for once, Soonyoung’s sweatshirt- which, if he thinks back far enough, is actually Wonwoo’s- is the one damp with tears.

 

There are car lights flitting across the wall through the half-closed blinds, and there’s the sound of distant noise and people from the streets below. But up here, they’re all alone in a world of their own. There’s Soonyoung and there’s the boy he loves, broken and fragmented in his arms, and there’s nothing more to the world, as far as he’s concerned.

 

“Will you take me home?” Wonwoo asks him suddenly.

 

“But you’re already home.”

 

“Not this place. It’s not really home without you. Don’t you know that?”

 

“So are you homesick or heartsick, Wonwoo?” Soonyoung smiles sadly.

 

“Take me home,” Wonwoo repeats. He sounds like he’s falling asleep.

 

“ _Hush_ ,” Soonyoung murmurs, resuming the pattern he’s been stroking through his hair.

 

-

 

This place isn’t home, but it offers the same sort of familiarity and comfort. It feels like summer’s end. Like the inexplicable sadness that comes at the end of a long day, watching a sunset and coming home to everything you’ve ever wanted and still not feeling happy. But Soonyoung’s beginning to realize that nothing will ever be the way he wants it to be, and that it's quite alright.

 

They soak up the light, and the way the wind and the sun play is like Soonyoung and Wonwoo did when they were children. The sun and Wonwoo’s fingertips tap across Soonyoung’s cheeks, where freckles will soon bloom, and Wonwoo looks at Soonyoung like the sun looks down at a white-sand beach in August.

 

They launch a kite into a clear blue sky somewhere far away, and they feel like children again, their fingers slipping between each other’s like sand.

 

They have striped red-and-white towels, a wicker basket, and a small, chipped rowboat. There are fingers to a harp, there's the wind to their hair, and then there's Wonwoo to Soonyoung.

 

They leave the lagoon behind, and enter deep blue water. “You’re not the same person you were when you moved away two years ago,” Soonyoung tells him, his intention much softer than the words come out to sound, but he thinks Wonwoo understands.

 

“And you’re barely the same person I was trying to come back to,” Wonwoo whispers. It’s not accusatory, nor is it a retaliation. It’s just an acknowledgement of something they’re both well aware of.

 

“But maybe since we’ve both changed,” Soonyoung begins, pausing to fix his huge, lopsided sunhat; it casts dappled shadows down his face, and he pulls the strings tight around his chin, “these new versions of ourselves will be just as compatible together as we used to be.”

 

“I think so, too,” Wonwoo replies, ducking in underneath the sunhat and surprising Soonyoung with a kiss in its shadow.

 

“Where are we going, anyway?” Soonyoung asks once they’ve separated. “Seems like a whole lot of nothing out there.”

 

Wonwoo uses his hands to shield his eyes from the sun, and looks onwards at the crisp blue horizon. “Somewhere happy, I’d hope.”

 

 -

 

Soonyoung stands on a street-corner under the pouring rain. The whole world is drenched in shades of darkness, all cold and blue.

 

Then the rain stops. He can still hear it, but he can’t feel it anymore, and in this little corner of the storm, he finds himself haloed in hazy, warm redness. The difference is night and day; cold, dark loneliness followed by an embrace that has his ear pressed against a vivid heartbeat. He looks up, and there’s an umbrella held over him, and he turns to find Wonwoo standing by his side.

 

 

**THE END**

**Author's Note:**

> as always, thank you so much for reading.... comments are always the best thing i could receive and absolutely wonderful to wake up to, so if you can, please let me know how/if you liked this!!!! ^~^


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